Manic Market Fallout The drag on the technology sector shows what happens when markets are seized by manias, according to Brian Jacobsen, chief portfolio strategist at Wells Fargo Fund Management. Investors sought technology between 1990-2000 because of the investment in information technology and the blossoming of the Internet, but after the bubble burst, people became sanguine, he explains.

“I understand why people were excited about technology, and it got overdone. I think a lot of people thought, ‘We have enough. Who’s going to want to lay more fiber optic cable? Who needs to invest in tech or computers?’” he said.

Jacobsen says the longer-term lagging of the sector is really more a large-cap and medium-size cap story. Small-cap technology has beaten the broader market over time, he says, but the problem was picking who would survive.

“A lot of people are excited about technology, but they’re very skeptical about who’s going to lead. They don’t want to buy the next Pets.com. They want to buy the Amazon.com, but how do you determine which one is going to win? … That’s why a lot of people are leery of investing in technology because everything is about disruption. When everything is about disruption, it can create and destroy a lot of wealth in a very short period of time,” he said.

Picking Performance Mark Abssy, senior index and ETF manager for ISE ETF Ventures, doesn’t completely agree with the technology sector’s underperformance. He says that outside of the dot-com bubble bursting, the technology sector has performed well.

“Outside of that event, if we’re looking even from the end of September 2002 to now, we see an annualized rate on SPX [S&P 500] of 9.27% and 14.58% for the Nasdaq as of Aug. 31. That’s a 13-year period. With a 10-year period, that gap widens,” he said.

Rather than consider technology an underperformer, Abssy says, it’s really more about mania and how those form.

“I think that technology by its very nature is more prone to mania or to bubbles than other areas simply because it’s all about innovation and new things and the promise of a better tomorrow,” he said.

Technology companies come and go, Abssy notes.

“If something is so immensely popular or fulfills such a need, ultimately it turns into a commodity item,” he said, using the defunct company Global Crossing as an example.

“They were laying the backbone of the Internet. They were doing all this undersea cable stuff. It was awesome. We hadn’t seen that in some time, and look at all the money they were going to make, and the Internet was going to rule the world. The Internet is still going to rule the world, but at the end of the day, that turns into a commodity,” Abssy said.